Tag: psychology

Do you like to follow the rules? I’ll admit that I’m a begrudging rule follower. I have the heart of a rebel, and it’s my first instinct to want to ignore and break all rules. However, I’ve learned that breaking the rules can be stressful, so I usually just follow the rules anyway. I suppose that I’m a wannabe rule breaker – at least when it comes to the law.

When it comes to less set in stone rules, I’m a total rule breaker. I have been working on Blogthings for almost ten years, even though people nag me to get a “real job.” (Too late – I’m hooked!) I also broke the rules by doing my education a bit differently than most I know. Oh, and by marrying Mr. Blogthings only after we had been dating a few weeks.

So yeah, I’m no lawbreaker, but I’m not so big on rules. I try to set as few rules for myself as possible. They’re too constricting. I admire, but can never understand, friends who go on very strict diets, fitness regimins, or budgets. It doesn’t seem like a lot of fun to me. I prefer to trust myself and take it how it comes. If I mess up a bit with my health or finances, maybe I’ll overcompensate a bit. No biggie.

Do you believe in being self-compassionate? I believe in it, even though practicing it isn’t the easiest. I think we should strive to be easy on ourselves because no one else might be. And I also see self-compassion as the first step in change. You can’t make a positive improvement if you’re beating yourself up about something.

I had a challenging moment of self-compassion yesterday. I temporarily broke the Blogthings database by putting a semicolon in the wrong place somewhere. An easy mistake to make, but I wasn’t so easy on myself about it. Of course, making myself feel bad about my little mistake made everything worse. I had to step back, collect myself, and realize that this would be a perfect time to practice showing myself some compassion, empathy, and understanding 🙂

According to some research I found, there are three elements of self-compassion. The first element of self-compassion is self-kindness. This means being warm and loving toward ourselves when we fail or are in pain. The second element of self-compassion is recognizing your “common humanity.” Knowing that you are human and that you will make mistakes, suffer, have bad days and so on. For some reason, this is hard to admit at our worst moments – at least it is for me. The final element of self-compassion is mindfulness. Being aware of negative feelings and thoughts but not letting them become a part of who we are.

I agree that the above are all important aspects to caring for yourself, and I incorporated them in my latest quiz Are You Compassionate Toward Yourself? As always, there is not a right or wrong way to score on this one, so be sure to be easy on yourself even if you don’t get the result you want 🙂

Discussion topics (Comment below and let me know any or all of these):

I don’t know about you, but I find disgust to be a psychologically fascinating concept. As far as I know, every culture has things that they find disgusting, but what those things are vary widely. For example, in the United States, it’s considered disgusting to eat horse meat – while others in various countries have no problem with it. On the other hand, I’ve heard that many people who visit the US think that the hotels aren’t clean enough (I agree!), while they’re able to stay in business catering mostly to Americans.

I suppose we have all evolved to have a disgust trigger to keep us safe and healthy. After all, we all find rotting food and grotesque disease to be stomach turning. It’s our body’s way of telling us to avoid the danger we’ve noticed. I think that’s why disgust increases during pregnancy. And while what we’re disgusted by can vary culturally, it can also vary individually as well. We all have a particular “disgust sensitivity,” and some interesting new studies are showing that our disgust levels can correlate with interesting characteristics – like conservatism and neuroticism.

When developing my How Gross Are You? test, I tried to pick things that were disgusting in my culture, especially things that people rarely talk about. A lot of friends have told me that this is their favorite Blogthings quiz, because it is so taboo breaking. Do you agree? Do you have the stomach to even take it? I have to admit that I’m a high disgust person, and even rereading the quiz grosses me out a little 😉 (I’ll also freely admit that I DO kiss my dog on the mouth.)

Take How Gross Are You? and let me know what you get. Or don’t! I know this sort of result can be a bit personal. Maybe you could let me know what sort of thing you don’t find disgusting that other people do.

Are you a high maintenance person? I kind of think it’s hard not to be in our advanced, customizable world. It’s so easy to develop preferences, and when those preferences stick, it’s hard to shake them. I really blame the hedonic treadmill. The more choices we’re given, the more we adapt to them… and having a choice taken away is difficult. For example, I know I should just be happy that we have the ability to fly on airplanes. I still get grumpy, though, if I end up in a middle seat.

I try as best as I can to fight against being high maintenance, because it’s an annoying characteristic in others. How many times have you tried to be friends with someone, but it was too difficult because he or she had to have everything a certain way. The people I gravitate towards tend to be the lowest maintenance, and I would like to give others that ease as well. I purposely try to say yes to things I may not enjoy simply to be easygoing. And it usually works – I have fun anyway 🙂

I do like to indulge in a bit of high maintenance behavior, but my compromise is I keep those activities to myself. At home, I like my food, entertainment, and work a certain way, and I rarely deviate from that. By giving myself exactly what I want, I have more room to compromise with others and at least appear low maintenance 😉

What about you? Are You High Maintenance? Take my quiz to find out! I don’t think there’s any right or wrong answer to this one, so don’t be offended if you’re high maintenance.

Let me know what you get on Are You High Maintenance? Is it true for you? Do you have any tips for dealing with high maintenance people? Or do you prefer to be around lower maintenance people?

One of the biggest questions I get asked is “Where do all your quiz ideas come from?” I typically think of quiz ideas out of nowhere (inspiration!), but occasionally I take requests from Blogthings fans. And even more occasionally, I see what someone is searching for to get to our site and decide to include it if it’s a good match. (All major search engines automatically give web sites this anonymous information.)

The last way is what happened with today’s quiz. I noticed a while ago that someone was searching for a quiz on eccentricity, but we didn’t yet have one. I was surprised that I hadn’t written an eccentricity quiz yet, as it seems like the perfect topic for Blogthings. After all, we all wonder where will fall in the spectrum of unusual to normal.

At first, I didn’t know how to write an eccentricity quiz because it’s not a typical psychological dimension. I wanted to make my quiz as theoretically valid as possible, especially considering there are many ways to look at eccentricity. While doing my research, I ran across the idea of a schizotypal personality, and I think a mild version of this describes eccentrics to a ‘T.’ (And I should know, I am one!)

Schizotypal people tend to exhibit odd behavior and thinking. They have trouble fitting into normal social situations, and they look at the world very differently. Schizotypals are unusual in lots of ways, and they don’t have much normality in their lives. Obviously, this can be troublesome at the extreme, but when I thought about it, a lesser version of this is exactly what it means to be an eccentric. (And yes, if you were wondering, these types are a lot more likely to be creative or “genius” types!)

So I took a few schizotypal personality scales and riffed on them a bit to make my own test milder. Are You Eccentric? Take the quiz, and let me know what you get. Do you consider yourself to be eccentric?

P.S. Want more psychology and personality quizzes like this one? Sign up for my weekly email list to get new quizzes every week: Blogthings Weekly

Have you thought about what it means to live the good life? It’s a pretty loaded question. No wonder philosophers, psychologists, and all sorts of other folks have been talking about it for years. It’s an important topic – if not *the* topic, and at times it feels like we’re no closer to any answers. I’m pretty sure that most of us are interested in living as well as possible, it’s just not easy to do, and there’s no agreement on how to do it.

Recently I was reading an old psychology book, and I was introduced to some of the theories of a mid 20th century psychologist, Carl Rogers. Rogers had a humanistic approach to psychology, and his ideas struck me as very relevant and compassionate. In particular, he had a whole view on what it takes to live a good or fulfilled life, and I was surprised to find myself agreeing with all of it.

Rogers laid out five concepts that must be embraced for a good life:

Being fully open to experience

Living in the present moment

Trusting ourselves

Taking responsibility for our choices

Creativity

As you can probably see, Rogers put a lot of emphasis on self-expression, self-acceptance, and self-directed growth. I found his concepts of the good life to be empowering and positive. I think we could all use a little more of these things (I know I could!), and adopting them seems like a doable plan.

As usual with Blogthings, I like to think about what’s already going well in life, so I decided to write a quiz to see which concept of Rogers’ good life each of us are already embracing: How Do You Live the Good Life?

Have you ever heard the term “type A personality”? Maybe you’ve even used it to describe yourself. When we think of “type A” people, we are thinking about people who are driven to succeed. Type A people don’t give up easily, and sometimes they’re so focused on their goals that they neglect the effects of their hard charging ways. It’s classic type A for someone to take on more than he or she can handle.

Originally, typing people as “A” or “B” was used to figure out their personality type’s risk for heart disease. Scientists now question the validity of type A people being more prone to heart attacks, but there have been studies that suggest people who adopt a more laid back, “type B” lifestyle have less recurring heart problems. And I think we could all agree that it intuitively lines up. Stress is never good for your mental or physical health.

I don’t know if anyone else is like this, but I’m a recovering type A for sure. When I was in school, I used to get upset if I got less than 100% on a test. And of course, having such high demands on myself only led to failure. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve tampered my ambition quite a bit, and I feel happier for it.

Take my quiz Do You Have a Type A Personality? to find out how Type A you are. Unlike, most Type A / Type B quizzes, I give you a bit of gradation with A-, B+, etc. And remember, A is not necessarily best. Or worst. I think we all go through phases in our lives with this, and it’s more about where you are right now.

P.S. Fun fact about this quiz… It was once featured in the online show notes for the Howard Stern show back when he was on regular radio. I’m not really sure how that happened, and I’m not sure how Howard scored personally 😉

Have you heard of the DISC personality test? If you’ve spent a fair amount of time in corporate environments, you probably have. The DISC personality test is based on 20th century industrial psychology, and it measures people along four dimensions – originally dominance, inducement, submission, and compliance. Although these sorts of measurements seem a bit industrial and jargon-y to me, I thought this was an interesting way to look at personality, so I looked further and decided to develop my own test: The POGS Personality Test

While the original DISC test has a dominance scale, I updated my result to be power. I think dominance has quite a few negative connotations, and I think it’s more useful to think of that type as powerful and in control instead. Instead of having compliance as a result, I updated that to organized. For a while people used conscientiousness instead of compliance, but I thought organized was a better fit for someone who has good control of one’s life. (And thinking of someone as being compliant just seems creepy to me!) Instead of submission (or as some people like, steadiness), I picked grounded. I just like that word and what it connotes 🙂 And finally, instead of inducement (or for modern tests, influence), I picked social, since that is the most social type.

Anyway, whether you like the original DISC framework or not, I hope you find some insight from The POGS Personality Test. I also reworked the test a bit to make it less career oriented while still being career applicable. I know we are all in different phases in our lives, and I think personality typology is still useful outside of the workplace. (It’s also my little rebellion against Americans making too much about work!)

Let me know what you got on The POGS Personality Test. Does your result fit you? If you’ve taken the DISC test before, I’d like to know how your result on my POGS test compares 🙂

Do you remember when it was all the rage to talk about whether people were left brained or right brained? As a young girl, I remember my mom and aunt talking about the brain hemisphere test they had taken in a book. They were going through each person in our family and guessing whether that person was “right-brained” or “left-brained.” Even though I was still quite young, I was very intrigued by this test and begged my mom to let me take it. I did, and I ended up right down the middle. I was amazed by my result, and this was one of the first things that got me hooked on personality tests.

In case you’re not familiar with “left-brain right-brain theory,” it’s the idea that many of us have one dominant side of our brains that we operate with. This is not a scientific theory, but it’s something that people have surmised based on actual data about how the brain works. How much weight you put in it is up to you, but I know that some people (including myself) have seen it as an interesting way of typing people.

People who are right brain dominant tend to be better at creative and expressive tasks. Right-brained people are good at playing music, expressing emotions, working with color, dealing with images, and using their intuition. People who are left brain dominant tend to be better are logical, analytical, and verbal tasks. Left-brained people are good at critical thinking, reasoning, writing, and math.

So are you more right or left brain dominant? Take my quiz Are You Right or Left Brained? to find out where you fall on the brain hemisphere scale. This quiz is a bit long, but the tradeoff is a good amount accuracy…at least from what I’ve been told.

Have you ever heard the phrase “Keep Calm and Carry On”? It was featured on a propaganda poster in Britain during World War II with the purpose of giving people hope after being under air raid attacks. The poster was forgotten about for years but has been recently rediscovered and reissued. People around the world consider “Keep Calm and Carry On” to be an inspiring and cheeky motto during these tough economic times, and there are now many variations on the theme.

I have felt very inspired by the Keep Calm movement myself, because I think that it’s something I need to work on. I have poor stress management skills, and I’m easily overwhelmed. If I can remember to Keep Calm and do whatever I need to do, it makes my life more productive and happier. Maybe I need a Keep Calm and Write Quizzes poster in my office 🙂

I’m not surprised that the world (including myself) has latched on to the Keep Calm mottos lately. I feel like things aren’t great for a lot of us economically, and it’s sometimes hard to keep going with the daily grind. I love the feeling that we’re all working on improving the world and our lives together in small ways. Many of you on this blog inspire me with your stories of going back to school, working hard, following your dreams, and / or raising a family 🙂

Recently I came across a collection of these Keep Calm variation images by an independent artist, and I knew that I had to theme a quiz around it. I figure we could all use a little reminder to Keep Calm during tough times, and I thought it would be fun to write a quiz that includes what else you’re supposed to do. Here it is: What Should You Keep Calm and Do?